windows 8

With surprisingly little ceremony at all, Microsoft has announced that the next major update for Windows 8.1 is coming next week on August 12 — except calling it a ‘major update’ is a wee bit of an overstatement. In fact, despite rumors that we’d be seeing a significant ‘Update 2’ in August, Microsoft says that’s definitely not the case. In short, if you were hoping for something exciting from the second Windows 8.1 update, you will be sorely disappointed — unless you’ve been avidly awaiting some touchpad tweaks, anyway.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has confirmed that the next version of Windows, probably Windows 9, will unify the Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox operating systems into ‘one single converged operating system.’ Microsoft had previously made some moves towards unification with Universal Windows Apps that run across all three platforms, but this new version of Windows will go a lot further: ‘This means [we’ll have] one operating system that covers all screen sizes.’

The behemoth flails wildly. At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft has finally decided to compete with Chromebooks at the very lowest end of the PC market. Come fall, you’ll be able to get your hands on an HP Stream laptop running Windows 8 for just $200 — a Windows price point that we haven’t seen since the last time the PC market scraped the barrel (netbooks). With Chromebooks quickly gobbling up market share, and Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 failing to gain a significant foothold, Microsoft has clearly decided it’s time to resort to desperate measures.

Over the last couple of days, screenshots that purport to be from an early build of Windows 9 (Threshold) have leaked online. Most notably, one of these screenshots includes the new, resurrected Start menu that Microsoft first showed off at its Build conference in April. Another screenshot shows Metro apps running in a window on the Desktop.

Microsoft’s new CEO, just 12 months after Steve Ballmer declared that Microsoft was a “devices and services” company, is changing the behemoth’s course yet again. Starting from fiscal year (FY) 2015 — i.e. today — Microsoft is now all about mobile and cloud. In a letter that was emailed to Microsoft employees today, Nadella gushes forth with incredibly bold statements that try to define what he wants the company to be, and attempts to outline the extraordinary measures that must now be undertaken to actually get the company there.

Back in 2010, a few months after the iPad’s release, Steve Jobs predicted that tablets would eventually overtake PCs. Now, according to updated figures from Gartner, after five years of rather crazy tablet growth and slowly declining PC sales, 2015 will be the year that Jobs’ post-PC dream is finally realized. In 2015, Gartner predicts a total of 320 million tablet sales, versus just 316 million PC sales (desktops and laptops) — and that’s an optimistic figure, too, that presumes businesses will continue to upgrade to Windows 7, and that Windows 9 (probably due in 2015) will drive increased PC sales.

Intel wants to push Samsung and other vendors to dramatically cut the price of 4K panels and AIOs, but the company is targeting the wrong screen size for the effort. 24-inch panels are simply too small for 4x the resolution — and if you have to scale software upwards by 2-4x, you lose the advantages of the effect.

As a Microsoft fanboy, I did not sleep well last night. In case you missed it, Apple’s WWDC keynote was awesome. It was funny and informative, but above all it showcased just how powerful Apple is becoming in the software arena. As Craig Federighi walked us through a seemingly never-ending list of useful features in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, an uncomfortable truth started to dawn on me: After obtaining and sustaining supremacy in both hardware design and manufacturing, Apple is now going after Microsoft’s last bastion of defense – software.

At the inaugural Code Conference in California, CEO Satya Nadella has revealed that Microsoft’s real-time speech translation technology will finally make the jump from the mystical, bottomless pit of its R&D department to a consumer product: Skype. On stage at the conference, Nadella demoed a beta version of Skype Translator, which performed real-time translation of English to German speech, and vice versa. Skype Translator isn’t perfect, but it’s tantalizingly close to the creation of a Star Trek-like universal translator — or Babel fish if you prefer — that allows everyone in the world to communicate, even if they don’t share a common language.

Watching the Surface Pro 3 event yesterday, I wryly smiled as Panos Panay finally revealed Microsoft’s vision for the future of mobile computing: The damn stylus. Snap-in keyboards, friction hinges, and high-resolution displays are still there, of course, but it is the humble stylus that will elevate Microsoft from tablet also-ran to mobile computing greatness. Apparently.

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